Jim Rogers - China's the future, dollar is doomed and the Fed's a disaster (vid) | Hacker News Reader

Jim Rogers - China's the future, dollar is doomed and the Fed's a disaster (vid)

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13 pointsnickb15 comments

While it is not directly hacker news, I believe it's of utter importance to know what's happening with the currency you earn most of your money.

Take my example. I currently live in Switzerland and am now moving to California, for entrepreneurial reasons.

But I must say it has become less attractive if you look at the Swiss Franc to US Dollar: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=usdchf

In 5 years the Dollar has lost 25% ! That means that now Americans in average are 25% poorer compared to Switzerland than they were 5 years ago.

And the worst that can happen to America is if the smart, driven and hard working people it has been attracting for centuries stop coming. They are the ones that drive America's growth. And with the dollar down the tubes they might think twice before following their American Dream.

Agree. Macroeconomic effects are things that are often ignored by the public as a whole, but are so essential to understanding what's happening, both historically / politically and on our scale, where we're trying to build a startup that matters.

For you, it can be an advantage to keep your earnings in your Swiss bank in francs, and take out money as needed in USD.

The only disadvantage would be if the dollar continued to slide. But if you don't immediately need the capital and plan to return in the near future, I'd leave it overseas.

If I were you I'd hedge my bets, moving some across now and some across later. I'm also a foreign immigrant living in the US and if I still had a big stash of foreign currency sitting around I'd be looking at buying US dollars right now.

I don't think the current low levels of the US dollar are sustainable. You have to remember that interest rates in the US have been cut to rock bottom, while they remain higher in other countries.

For instance, right now I could borrow money from a bank in the US at about 5% and invest it at over 8% in Australia (and those are just the interest rates that I, the consumer, can get -- I could do even better if I were a hedge fund or something). This is a huge arbitrage opportunity, and I'd be crazy not to take advantage of it... unless of course the US dollar goes back up over the course of my loan and wipes out my profit. The fact that the apparent opportunity exists means that the market is obviously priced on the assumption that the US dollar is going to go back up eventually, and is currently being held down only by the low interest rates.

Does he think large pink bowties are the future, too? Or perhaps just that they distract from his enormous second chin? Either way, I'm calling his judgement into question.

I'm not very old, but I'm old enough to remember the way that Japan was going to own the whole world soon, back in the late 80s (just before Japan went stagnant). I also remember the unstoppable rise of the "Asian Tiger economies" back in the mid-90s, just before the Asian currency crisis. I've stopped worrying about these sorts of things, now.

I agree a lot of this China stuff is hype but I don't think it is the same as the Japan stuff.

First of all Japan has about the same population size as the US, I think it fits between the US and Germany. China and India on the other hand have MUCH bigger populations. And all of their people want to be middle class.

The Asian tigers went through a financial crisis (who hasn't) and I think they have already largely recovered. So while any one of them is small, Vietnam is only about 80 million people, together they are a very significant economic region. And people in all of them want to own cars, eat stake, be just like the first worlders.

Wow, I didn't realize that Japan's population was similar to the US. You really do learn something everyday...

I agree, the desire for India and Chinese to bolster the middle class is at the heart of the problems we will face in the next few years.

We balk at paying $4/gallon for gas, but the folks in the East who have no historical frame of reference like we do, may easily accept $8/gallon. (I hate saying we, since some Y!Hackers aren't from the US, you know what I mean...)

If this is true, then Eastern oil importers can bid much higher prices, pushing our prices higher.

Actually, Japan's population is less than half of US: ~127 m vs ~301 m.

Trees do not grow to the sky. China has a lot of problems, among them pollution, corruption everywhere, the failed state banking and securities markets, etc. They will bump into natural limits to growth, as indeed they have already in some cases.

Boy, that sounds a lot like the US, and any other country which is going through the same set of problems.

China's problems sound a lot like those of the US? That's an interesting opinion, but I'd be more inclined to believe you if you backed it up with facts.

I flagged this one too. This isn't hacker news.

Please, go back to reddit.

And you should be a man enough to use your real account.

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